Certain poems lodge themselves in the consciousness and stay put; become part of the obsessive anthology you take around everywhere with you, yardsticks by which you measure the effect of other poems and your own attempts to write. Sometimes the attraction is a music, a tune that won’t let go, or something as happenstance as a location, an evocation of a familiar place. ‘Herbert Street Revisited’ certainly has these for me, with its memorable opening and slow, bittersweet movement, and the way it inhabits its different temporal zones — calling up a particular Dublin at a precise moment of its history but framing its attention to the particulars of the moment in a backward glance that also looks into the future.

The book it appears in, The Great Cloak, is one of the poet’s finest, a beautifully orchestrated collection of lyrics on love and loss, and like the book as a whole the poem in its three distinct and carefully paced sections is subtly constructed and arranged. On one level it is a deeply intimate poem, a portrait of early marriage, but it also radiates outward to encompass the social world — the private sadness of Nurse Mullen, the smouldering bohemian glamour of Brendan Behan, the lives of animals and neighbours ‘treading the pattern /of one time and place into history’. All offer an image of continuity, endurance, of our old lives somehow continuing on their own track. I love the spare economic way in which the poem achieves its effects, how the particular details are so evocative and true and somehow essential — the cat ‘upon his masculine errands’, Behan, the ‘released bull’ shouldering up the street, the pony and donkey who ‘cropped flank / by flank under the trees opposite; / short neck up, long neck down’ and Nurse Mullen kneeling ‘by her bedside / to pray for her lost Mayo hills, / the bruised bodies of Easter Volunteers’. He evokes a whole world; the poem moves effortlessly from personal memory into a wide-angled shot of ’50s Ireland. This is actually a difficult transition to achieve and Montague does it masterfully. Like the personal one, that social world is full of promise and loss: the gap between idealism and reality represented by Nurse Mullen and her cherished memories of volunteer sacrifice, the dangerous and destructive creative energy in the rampaging Behan.

In its intermeshing of public and private the poem is emblematic of his wider achievement, in that the poems are never either one or the other, but function instead as a series of layerings of different spheres of experience. We remember the epigraph to The Great Cloak

The lines reconfigure the terms of an apology into a defence of a poetry of private experience, but Montague’s deeper intention is to insist on the fusion of these domains. The Rough Field is a personal journey which, by that very insistence, ramifies into the political. This may be a very Northern kind of achievement — the poetry produced by a society whose divisions and conflicts are intimate and personal and neighbourly.

What makes the poem moving is also its act of summoning: the poet summons and celebrates his past, ‘enabling the spirit to sing / of old happiness, when alone’. That act of summoning leads to the rhetorical flourish of the concluding section and, again, it is the poise and accuracy of the language that we register and admire: ‘let Brendan trundle his corpse …’, the cat as ‘tiny emissary / of our happiness’, falling ‘soft / clawed into a landlord’s dustbin’, the companionable pony and donkey ‘lifting / their hooves through the moonlight’. The poem is dense with telling detail, each one of which adds to its emotional weight and furnishes it with a kind of an airy and unforgettable materiality.